The Green-left are like the sort of gullible rubes who’ll happily buy any old tat, so long as the seller waves their hands and mysteriously intones some mumbo-jumbo about “wooo…ancient wisdom”. Or Mrs Costanza on Seinfeld, who thought that something was only “wise” so long as it came from a Chinese person. Green activists campaign against hazard reduction burning when it’s done by the wicked whitefella, but slap on a bit of ochre and they’re happy to torch away.
“Indigenous cultural burning” is nothing more than straight-up hazard reduction, wrapped up in a bit of “dreamtime” mumbo-jumbo. In practice, it’s nothing more than the sort of forestry and land-management techniques and bushfire recommendations that were used for decades (since the 1930s) by farmers, graziers and foresters. But they’re whitefellas, and everyone knows that everything the white man does is wanton destruction.
Dress up common-or-garden forestry in a possum-skin cloak of “indigenous practice”, though, and the Green-left and their media cronies coo in delight.
As Australia’s bushfire emergency rages on, discussion over fire authorities’ potential use of Indigenous and cultural fire practices has come under the spotlight.
But what are these practices? Where can they be implemented? And how can they help?
[…]Cultural burning generally uses small, cool, controlled flames, but there’s no set formula for every burn, according to Mr Costello.
Local knowledge from traditional custodians guides how practitioners use fire: the size, shape, direction and duration of the burn.
“We look at habitat, look the vegetation, we look at the soil type, we look at the moisture levels, that determines how we burn, how hot we burn,” he said.
Which sounds exactly like any hazard reduction burn I’ve ever been on – just replace “traditional custodians” with “locals”, and subtract a whole, suffocating wall of green tape.
According to Mr Costello, hazard reduction burns, conducted by state-based fire authorities, are generally focused on reducing fuel load or types of debris and vegetation that can feed a fire.
abc.net.au/news/2020-01-09/indigenous-cultural-fire-burning-method-has-benefits-experts-say
Well, that’s kind of the point of “hazard reduction”. In landscapes dominated by pyrophitic flora, hazard reduction brings exactly the same benefits as “cultural burning”. Just without the mysticism.
This is the typical magical-thinking hypocrisy of the Green left, who’ll mock and deride religion when it’s dressed in a cassock, but worship at its feet when it’s painted with a bit of ochre.
It’s also typical leftist soft racism to think that anyone can have a magical access to special knowledge denied to anyone else, simply because of their ancestry. After all, the vast majority of Aborigines today live in cities and towns, as isolated from the natural environment as any white, urban Greens voter. As one indigenous woman put it, “I’m Aboriginal, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about burning”.
We already know what we have to do to minimise the risk of mega-fires. Yes, the Aborigines knew it, but so did the white farmers and foresters who followed after them, and so did a series of royal commissioners. They only people who didn’t get it are the Green-left and their cronies in the media and state bureaucracies, who think that normal land-management techniques are some kind of ‘ancient wisdom’.
By all means, go back to what needs to be done, but spare us the soft-racist hoodoo nonsense.
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